Given a Song: Ghost Dance

Poetry
Written By Ed Roberson

The floor nurse was not floating in mid air
she informed me with her title   her name though
was nonlocal   her words were carried from where I knew
but were colored with a music like her skin
the same as I wore   not from here
but from different darks of origin
Indian West Indian Dravidian blacker than us both
had mixed us African   our new world. Her name was Mary. 

Language patterns and transmits these symbols mouth to ear
in humans   creates   what was not clear  and locates it
here    I answered my name    she explained
anyone attending me would ask the same questions
my whole stay here first     it was hospital policy     asks me
to flex the muscles of my face smile   a mask as
oracular as comedy or tragedy   the startled
archaic O     stick out my tongue 

follow the fingers side to side     focus on the nose
how many on the hand   as gestural a dance
as bee word   squeeze her fingers
We discuss where I stand from this tablet
this blanket   we sit on this rim    ring
out of which emanates our story   the plans
the tribe cathedral   the impossible abstracted
cities    I am given       3:01am   across time a song 

to see if I have had a stroke   to say if I am
conscious   to raise us from the dead   Ghost Song 

Can you tell me your name
Can you tell me your name
No
It will come
It will come back to you
Who
It will All
Come back

 
Ed Roberson

Ed Roberson is the author of ten books of poetry including the chapbook Closest Pronunciation (Northwestern University Press, 2013). His most recent full-length collection, To See the Earth before the End of the World (Wesleyan University Press, 2010), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and one of two runners-up for the Kingsley-Tufts Award. An earlier work, Atmosphere Condition (Sun and Moon, 2000), was selected for the National Poetry Series and nominated for the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Award.

His newest collection, Asked What Has Changed, is projected for release from Wesleyan University Press in 2020.

Roberson is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Other honors include the African American Literature and Culture Association’s Stephen Henderson Critics Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award.

Retired from Rutgers University, Roberson lives in Chicago, where he has taught classes and workshops at the University of Chicago, Columbia College, and Northwestern University. From 2009 to 2014, he was an artist in residence teaching in Northwestern’s English and creative writing departments. He is currently an emeritus professor in Northwestern’s MFA creative writing program. Roberson has served as an instructor at the Cave Canem Retreat for Black Writers and as the Holloway Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

While earning his undergraduate degree at the University of Pittsburgh, Roberson was a research assistant in limnology and traveled on expeditions through Canada, Alaska, the Kodiak and Afognak Islands, and Bermuda. As an expedition member of the Explorers Club of Pittsburgh, he climbed mountains in the Peruvian and Ecuadorian Andes. Roberson has worked as a diver-tankman in the Pittsburgh AquaZoo, in steel mills, and in advertising graphics. He has motorcycled across the United States and has traveled in West Africa, Mexico, and the Caribbean.

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